The House I Grew Up In
by Lance Ruhiru
Summary: ... never felt like home. CraigKenny


Craig's family went on welfare when he went into the third grade, and he was always extremely paranoid that his classmates would find out. He went to great lengths to build a persona that could explain torn clothes and a scruffy, unwashed appearance—he never really meant to be so unpleasant as to be unapproachable, but it saved him the trouble of making excuses why he never extended invitations to his house.

It was only when his front was firmly established that Craig returned to his cinematic pursuits by way of South Park Elementary's closed-circuit television system. He bought an outdated camera from a pawnshop, following a couple ducks around trying to capture them on film, and then began to pull at his hair in frustration, cursing himself for not realizing everything at a pawnshop is shit: the camera would not record anything but black.

"You've got the lens cap on," a voice called. Craig looked up and there was Kenny seated on a park bench, alternating between feeding ducks from and helping himself to a loaf of Wonder Bread. He'd pull out a slice and pinch off a piece, roll it into a ball, then chuck it at one of the waiting mallards.

Craig knew Kenny because, in elementary, everyone was everyone else's best friend—rather, nobody was nobody's friend. Everyone was invited to everyone's birthday, anyone was welcome to join any football game. Elementary school students are too young to have decisive enough opinion to not get along. Of course, no one really _knew_ anyone.

A comprehensive list of what Craig knew about Kenny: he couldn't throw for shit but no running back ever got past him, he knew all the words to _There Once Was a Man From Nantucket_, and he ALWAYS won when they played chicken on the railroad tracks.

It is actually because of Kenny that Craig was so paranoid of letting it slip that the government sent his family checks in the mail. Cartman once said in passing that Kenny's frequent brushes with death were his punishment for being poor. It wasn't that Craig _believed_ him, exactly, but he didn't want the stigma.

"Aren't you working with Token and those other guys?" Craig ventured, and Kenny gave a very short "no" that explained the situation thoroughly. "Wanna, like... hold the camera and shit?"

"Sure," Kenny said, and swung off of the bench. He picked up the package of white bread from the sealed end and upturned it onto the ducks, which resulted in a messy jumble of ducks piling on top of each other.

Craig had no way of knowing if Kenny was smiling, because his face was obstructed from nose to chin, but he liked to imagine that he was; he liked to think he put it there.

o

Kenny took long sabbaticals in middle school. No one ever acknowledged his lengthy absences—no one even seemed to _notice_—except Craig.

One day, after receiving yet another referral and not feeling like going to the office, he found himself in the library. South Park Middle's library was in sorry shape. Nearly every book had been defaced in some way, but Craig could only conclude the school had bought them that way, because no one with half a mind went into the library. (Incidentally, most people in South Park possessed half a mind.)

So Craig was shocked to find Kenny curled up at a table in the back right corner, his shoes resting on the edge of his seat and his knees drawn up to his chest, an open book resting on his left thigh, cover flap hanging over. He approached and pulled out a chair opposite, sitting down and reading the title.

"_Memoirs of a Geisha_? Somehow I expected you to be reading porn."

Kenny wore a hat pulled down over his hat, a hand-me-down oversized jacket from his older brother that made him look more underfed than he actually was, and a scarf wound several times over his throat and mouth. Craig used to wonder if people paid so little attention to Kenny because his choice in clothes gave him such anonymity.

Kenny's cheeks creased in a way that could indicate either a smile or a smirk and he said, "Man, it's hella raunchy. You don't even _know._"

Craig wanted to ask Kenny then if this was where he always went when he disappeared; if he didn't even die at all anymore, but just needed a hiatus from the residents of South Park now and then so that they didn't drive him mad. But Kenny had never spoken about his unique relationship with death before—when he _did_ speak—and Craig didn't know if he should talk about it. He knew all about keeping secrets, after all.

Kenny spent the entire summer after eighth grade sitting on bleachers, watching the newly-formed Cowgirl's Softball Team practice. The rest of the guys mocked him often for being a cheerleader, but that summer Kenny made it to every base but home with each girl on the team.

They threw a party on the last day of summer to celebrate their soon-to-be-high-schooler's status. They commemorated the progression with a regression and congregated in the playground they spent many a recess playing in during their elementary school days. Craig sat up on the jungle gym and tried his first cigarette from Tweek, who was always looking for a drug sedative enough to combat caffeine. He looked down at Kenny, who was singing along to his Walkman, a birthday present he was very proud of. Kenny always was behind in technological advances. "_Who says you can't go home / There's only one place that call me one of their own_," Kenny crooned, rocking his hips in the spotlight of a street lamp.

That night Kenny was formally ousted from the Cartman/Stan/Kyle clique and officially replaced with the much more compliant and predictable Butters.

Craig returned home to the destitution he has grown accustomed to and lay on his mattress, staring up at the boxers dangling from an arm of his ceiling fan. He doesn't sleep; he does that on the first day of high school, drooling through various teachers' syllabuses.

o

April 20th fell on a Sunday during Craig's junior year of high school. Nearly everyone he knew was celebrating 4-20 in the usual way, but for the first time since he started high school, Craig was struck with the urge to return to his childhood playground. He sat on edge of the marry-go-round and rotated slowly, employing the grapevine, like when they forced them to line dance in middle school, something he always felt bordered on child abuse.

Craig was shocked when Kenny wandered up, because Kenny was absent more often than he was around, those days. Sometimes Craig paused to think about it—usually when he went to the restroom in A-hall, the one that has _There Once Was a Man From Nantucket_ immortalized on the third stall's door in Kenny's hand, the only tangible proof of Kenny's existence—and wondered if Kenny only bothered to come back when they were kids so he could fill out the foursome.

The thought always depressed Craig more than his concealed poverty ever could.

Kenny was clearly high: his eyes, still the only observable feature of his face, were red. "Did you know," he said to Craig in lieu of a greeting, "that some reptiles take air in through their cloaca? Like a reverse fart."

"... No," Craig said as Kenny reclined on the merry-go-round beside him.

"I like thinking about things no one else does," Kenny explained, spread out in a way that can't help but stir up Jesus imagery.

Craig could certainly relate to that, because he spent a great deal of time thinking about Kenny. He leaned over the other boy and knew, without being told, that Kenny was dying. There were a thousand things he wanted to ask him, but ultimately settled on the first question he'd ever conceived.

"Kenny," Craig said, "_who_ are the bastards?"

Kenny laughed. "Who isn't?"

That was the last time anyone saw Kenny in South Park. His family lost their house, packed up and left South Park without him. His seat at school was filled with generic blond after generic blond. There were no pictures of him in the yearbook because he always managed to be absent on picture day. Kenny became something of a myth: the local ghost story, the only camp fire tale that no one told. Whenever Craig needed reassurance that Kenny had ever truly existed at all, he'd go to the bathroom and read the unsigned limerick on the broken stall door.

When they graduated high school Clyde threw a pool party; "Who know who I miss?" Tweek said calmly, and you could always tell when Tweek was high, because that was the only time he wasn't twitching like a spasming gerbil. Craig's breath caught, and he only started breathing again when Tweek said "Red." Craig let himself out the sliding glass door and stood on the porch, watching his now-ex-classmates splash around in the pool. Of course, Tweek was still bemoaning his breakup with Red. But for a moment Craig had thought he was going to say "Kenny"—and Craig was almost positive he would have punched him in the face if he had.

There were a thousand things Craig had wanted to say to Kenny, and now that he had officially entered adulthood, it felt like he'd never get the chance. Like Kenny was as much a part of childhood as Santa and the Toothfairy, and that Craig had divorced it forever.

o

Craig went to community college in Conifer, and rose to the level expected of his tax bracket. He joined a gang, wherein he used pruning shears to cut off the fingers of the people that racketed up debts betting on cock fights.

One day his associates dragged in a twenty-something-year-old and held his squirming body down over a table. Craig approached; poised the shears; made the mistake of looking him in the eyed.

It was a shock to the system to see Kenny's unblemished, unclad face.

Kenny's expression made a fluid transformation from terror, to pleasant surprise, to droll amusement. His lips (and they were the kind of beautiful Craig had always expected them to be, that puckered like they'd been custom made to kiss) finally curled into the smile Craig had long longed to get a glimpse of, the way others would quest after a flash of panties, as it had been as jealously and as militantly covered.

"Bastard," he said without malice, but rather as if it were an old shared joke, and in Craig's stupor, he accidentally closed the shears on Kenny's middle finger. Kenny screamed, of course: familiarity with pain did not lessen the torment of it. And of course Kenny bled out, as only Kenny could.

When Craig returned home that evening he was startled—though he _shouldn't_ have been—to find Kenny in his living room, running long unmarred fingers over the yellowing labels on the cassette tapes Craig had recorded when he was too poor to buy DVDs, which he treasured dearly.

"I thought you wanted to be a director," Kenny said, and with that utterance proved he'd paid as much attention to Craig as Craig had paid to him.

Craig knelt on the floor beside him and took his hand, which looked as unremarkable as any other hand; Kenny laughed at him and said, "I'll think of you whenever I tell someone to fuck off."

"There are a thousand things I want to say to you," Craig said, "and they all start with 'Hello, I love you.' "


End file.
